Auroville Belongs to Nobody in Particular

For those of you who love communes, I went to Auroville last week. It's an intentional community with a huge gold plated room for a crystal in the center. The buildings are then laid out to imitate the layout of the universe. It was run by this lady called "The Mother." I now have two bumper-stickers of her eyes on my sitar case. They follow you.

Here is a picture of their center:


The community was interesting. I liked that it was a universal community whose land was cultivated from a dry desert into a kind of tropical forest. They had a nice organic store there, and the architecture differed greatly from the surrounding palm leaf houses.

They'll even let you stay, if you have 10,000 Euro in your bank account.

I would just live around outside it, I think. Auroville is right outside of Pondicherry, the french quarter of India. People there only speak French and Tamil. My English and limited Hindi were borderline useless.

But, we had a great time at the beach and shopping and eating at bakeries and french restaurants. These guys think we're crazy for burying people in sand:


Other fun in Pondicherry includes general vacation fun. Also an elephant blessed me outside a temple. This entailed me putting a rupee in the elephant's trunk and the elephant bopping me on the head with its trunk. Blessed. Bam.

To illustrate:


In short:

Today's Meal: French/Italian/Indian cuisine with some port for dessert

Today's Deal: Who knew they speak so much French in India?

Today's Reel: Lucia enjoying elephants at the temple